Step 3: Glue and more glue

Step 4: Enjoy the box!

Now you have a Portal tissue box to enjoy! For a brief bit, anyway. I made this as part of a redditgift Secret Santa gift exchange and mailed it out ...

Tissues come in boring boxes so why not put a geeked out cover on top of it? Why not indeed.

I recently saw this project on Kanojo.de and figured that I could easily do a version in acrylic with the help of a laser cutter. It also helps to make one big change which is to swap the Aperture icon on top for the blue Portal icon.

So where's the orange portal? On the inside of the box. Had to be consistent.

Step 1: Laser cutting the acrylic

This whole project uses 1.5 sq ft of 1/4" white acrylic and was cut on an Epilog Legend 36EXT.

The square and Portal cutouts were done in the normal way. Blasting with the laser until it was cut through. For the designs on the tops of the pieces, I did a light vector cut and peeled away the positive, leaving the safety film as a stencil.

Step 2: Paint!

The 5 side and bottom pieces were painted by first masking off the top edges and applying 2 coats of black spraypaint.

For the top piece, here is what I would do next time:
- Mask Portals and paint edges black
- Take off masking and paint underside orange (Montana Gold orange)
- Spraypaint top side blue (Montana Gold light blue)

Let the paint dry to the touch and remove the tape and protective film.

Step 3: Glue and more glue

For the sides and top of the box I used an acrylic glue to glue it all together. I clamped and weighted it down and let the whole thing sit for 24 hours.

When that was done, I hot glued 4 magnets on the inside of the box as well as 4 nuts onto the base plate. Now, when the base plate goes on the bottom it holds itself in place so you can pick up the whole box without the tissue box falling out.

Lol, I dunno where you live, but here in New York, no mall has a vinyl cutting kiosk (at least not from upstate to Albany. New York City might). However, anyone who considers using vinyl could ask around town to see if they could borrow one of those "Cricut" machines. They cut vinyl, but for a one-time project aren't really worth the price tag.

Yes, cricut machines come with pre-programmed graphics, but for any hard-core artist (certainly any one willing to drop 200 dollars on a fancy cutting machine) will usually spring for the design studio, as well, which allows you to design your own graphics on a computer. Yes, designing portal graphics would be illegal, but anyone who wants a portal tissue box will just have to accept that fact and, you know, do it anyway.